In the News

Editorial Urges Abortion-Rights Supporters To Remain 'Vigilant'

January 10, 2014 — Abortion-rights supporters in New Hampshire and across the country need to maintain "vigilance" against abortion restrictions that are misleadingly promoted as ways to protect women from substandard medical care, a Concord Monitor editorial states.

Specifically, the editorial takes issue with arguments in a Daily Caller opinion piece by Americans United for Life General Counsel Ovide Lamontagne, who sought the New Hampshire governorship in 2012.

Lamontagne and AUL are promoting legislation that would increase abortion clinic regulations and ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, the editorial notes. Lamontagne in the Daily Caller piece wrote that abortion providers resist additional regulations because the facilities "generate profits when they lower their costs by subjecting women to substandard care."

The Monitor notes that, according to a recent Guttmacher Institutereport, 22 states adopted 70 abortion restrictions in 2013, "including late-term abortion bans, new regulations on doctors, clinics and procedures and bans on insurance coverage."

New Hampshire is considering similar restrictions, including a bill that would "require burdensome state licensing for outpatient abortion clinics" and another that would "declare that life begins at conception."

Such legislation makes women's ability "to get the care they need in a timely, affordable manner" dependent "on where they live," which was "the very problem the Supreme Court hoped to solve back in 1973," when it legalized most abortions.

The editorial urges state lawmakers to continue New Hampshire's 40-year history of "largely resist[ing] attempts to insert the government between women and their health-care providers" (Concord Monitor, 1/8).

Video Round Up

N.C. Gov. To Break Campaign Promise on Abortion Bills

AP/ABC News 11's Ed Crump discusses how North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) will break his campaign pledge to not sign any abortion restrictions if he signs a 72-hour mandatory delay bill into law. Watch the video

Datapoints

See where states rank on reproductive rights across the U.S. Plus, find out how states are imposing more restrictions on and limiting women's access to abortion. Read more

At A Glance

"Not since before Roe v. Wade has a law or court decision had the potential to devastate access to reproductive health care on such a sweeping scale."

— Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, on a ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld major portions of a Texas antiabortion-rights law. Read more